Thursday, June 7th …..

We have a great cabin, it’s about the middle of the boat and close to the lifts so we don’t have interminable treks along narrow corridors if we want to go anywhere. The best thing, though, is that we are just two steps from the Latte-tudes coffee shop where they make fantastic cappuccinos. The coffee on the ship is the same as they use at Starbucks. Just recently, the company installed a Cupcake Cupboard in Latte-tudes (don’t you just love the pun). All their new ships will have one but Legend of the Sea is only the 7th ship in the company’s fleet of 22 to have this facility. I know all this because the Cupcake Supervisor (or Miss Cupcake) proudly told us all about it. It’s clearly a franchise and just another gimmick to get that point of difference with all the other ships trying to grab the same market.

It seems there’s an inspector on board and so she was a bit toey yesterday, worrying about what he might say when he came around. There was a bit of background going on, tidying and cleaning and checking that all the staff knew what they were doing. There’s one young fellow who seems to have the morning shift. He’s Chinese, wears horn-rimmed glasses and isn’t strong with English. He knows he needs to chat with the customers but it’s painful to try and have a sensible conversation so my heart sinks when he comes over to say Hi.

Yesterday was inspection day so another crew member came around to check his knowledge of coffee-making. The supervisor is Indian with that typical sing-song accent so the interaction between these two was like a Two Ronnies comedy sketch. ‘How many grams of coffee would you need for a single-shot?’ asked the supervisor. ‘How many grams…?’ replied the Chinese fellow, stalling for time and desperately trying to understand what was being asked. ‘Yes, how many grams!’ ‘How many grams ….?’

And ‘How many degrees should the milk be if you are making a latte?’ ‘How many deg…?’ ‘Yes, yes, how many degrees?’ And so it went. When the inspector finally arrived, the Chinese chappie was nowhere in sight. Perhaps he had been sent off to get a left-handed screwdriver, or something. And there’s another member of staff on duty this morning in the café.

As I write this, there’s a fruit-carving demonstration in the atrium, with three hosts, giving the commentary in three different languages. It’s getting embarrassing: at the show each night, the Cruise Director comes on stage to introduce the acts with two interpreters trailing behind him. We hear everything at least three times.

We didn’t sail until midnight last night. Japanese immigration were on board to see us off the premises, so to speak. The local community of Otaru had sent along their drum team to farewell us and what a fantastic demonstration they gave. In many ways it was a total shambles, more like a party act than a formal exhibition. There were some old men (even older than me), a couple of younger men, young women and a group of 4 or 5 teenage females who wore differently coloured jackets to signify, I suppose that they were beginners. There were 4 smaller drums and one big one and about 15 performers to play them. The pattern seemed to be to move around from drum to drum, having a bash on one of the smaller ones and then pushing your way up to the big one to belt the hell out of that for a while before someone pushed you out to have his or her turn.

One rather hefty woman was clearly the motivator with the most infectious smile. She kept chanting Goh, Goh, Goh, Goh, and some of the younger ones would say Tche, Tche, Tche. Everybody on stage was absolutely elated by their involvement. After about 15 minutes of mayhem, at some signal they all moved to their specific station, drummed for a few bars and finished with a massive flourish. I’ve seen taiko drumming before but this was something different, maybe specific to this area. People will leave Otaru with the best memories.